


Intrusive Hue

by KChasm



Category: Ib (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Passage of time, Post-Canon, forgotten portrait ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:22:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29027901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KChasm/pseuds/KChasm
Summary: Ib becomes an artist.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Intrusive Hue

Her parents worry. They try to hide it behind careful smiles and charming tones and _all_ the right euphemisms, but she’s not _dull_ , even if she spends most of her time between her own head and her canvas nowadays. There are the glances, and the whispered conversations, and the line of specialists they made her see until they figured out they weren’t doing any good. She’d like to hold their hands in hers, and explain that, no, she’s just as reasonable as she’s always been—but how would she explain that her life was inexorably set when she was nine? That something left its mark in her in the space between a blink and an eye opening again, and she’s been carrying that distortion with her ever since?

So no, she can’t, and so she doesn’t. She just paints and paints, and sketches, and draws, and saves up her allowances and birthday monies and part time jobs for all the more in brushes and canvases and pigments and pads.

* * *

It’s scribble-scrawled shapes and funny animals, the week after the gallery. Her parents buy her a children’s sketchpad, and joke that she might become their own little Guertena, and even laugh when she brings it back full the month after and asks for another. Later, as the years pass, it’s faces and musculature, architecture and perspective, and they start becoming impressed. They take it to a teacher or two, for second opinions, and no, she’s no Guertena, not just yet, but there’s the seed of something there. The teachers see it.

(They see something else, too, the really good ones. Something that makes their smiles a bit unsteady, makes their eyes flicker a bit too quick between Ib’s sketches and Ib’s hands and Ib’s face, like they’re trying to catch something just out of sight. She knows the expression. She’s seen it, in the mirror.)

Soon, she branches out, because she has to, of course: Canvas, and oils, and the trick of painting less to create more. It takes a month for her to touch the palette knife, and half a month after to wield it with any confidence, but she manages. She makes it her own.

But she’s still not ready. She knows this, but still she tries to paint him one night, anyway, spurred by a desperate, melancholy ache. She tries _once_. She even gets everything right—eyes, lips, swell of the cheek—but when it comes together it’s not him, and when her mother rushes upstairs she finds her gasping between laughter and tears, spilled over with her own paint, the stretcher bar shattered, canvas in shreds.

They start making her see the specialists, after that.

(Later, her mother tells her—once, herself, and hesitatingly, as if recalling a dream—that she’d opened the door and thought Ib had wounded herself. Ridiculous, but _she’d thought she’d wounded herself_. Ib can imagine the sight of her: Head, tilted back, sobbing with mouth pulled wide. In one hand, a knife. And paint dripping down from her outstretched wrist, dark and bloody blue.)

* * *

She gets noticed—she’s _good_ , after all, enough to make her way through art school scholarships, and then awards and grants. The _conversation_ is a little outside her expertise, but it’s necessary, so she smiles and attends, shakes hands and remembers names. Takes commissions, fostering her reputation (quiet, reclusive, highly talented, a little mad, in the way they say artists are supposed to be). At first she’s living frugally, from commission to commission, but soon the requests come so frequently she can pick and choose between the ones she wants. She buys her own studio and moves into it, full-time.

She knows she’s getting close when things stop lining up in the more obvious of ways. She starts one painting, and when she lifts her brush for the last time, hours later, she’s finished two of them, side by side. The right colors are always on her palette, whether or not she puts them there. She carves a woman’s smiling face from a block of marble she’s sure she didn’t buy.

She leaves her studio, one day, and finds a package next to her doorstop, wide and flat, wrapped in string and stamped over with stickers proclaiming fragile. The label is blank, except for the one name under the sender— _Guertena_ , penned there in her own tight handwriting.

She didn’t order this. She’s been waiting, for years. There’s no title, but she can recognize her own work well enough to know its name.

 _Study after Guertena’s Fabricated World_. She hangs it on the studio wall.

She has a painting of her own for this, already framed for safety. It’s the one she’s worked on the longest, since before she ever started on it. It’ll be her best so far, if she’s done it right: An exercise in negative space, painted and repainted void white, except for the center—and a single, brilliant, blooming blue rose.

With one arm, Ib tucks it against her body. With the other, she grips the edge of the canvas.

She pulls herself up—and she paints herself _in_.


End file.
